DMINLGP

DMin, Leadership and Global Perspectives: Crafting Ministry in an Interconnected World

Hello Ellen! My name is Jay Forseth, and I am a Pastor in small town America. I am writing this letter because I think you are kind. In fact, many times on your show your actions appear more Christian than most Christians I know. Your generosity impresses me. You are obviously successful and loads of…

I opened my laptop after reading Digital Minimalism and noticed the clutter on my screen in a new way. Before opening Microsoft Word, I minimized the following; 10+ website tabs from yesterday’s business and surfing; Evernote with several windows; email app; Nozbe task manage; Messenger; and iCal. And I consider myself a bit of a minimalist…

Is anyone out there a fan of Whose Line is It Anyway? (It was news to me, but I found out that the show originated in the UK before it crossed the pond.[1]) In it, comedians are given an open idea but no script on how to play their part. Imagine not being scripted, and…

The digital declutter has been a real struggle in the Davis house this year. With jobs that seem to demand constant connection and three sons ages 14, 13 and 7 years old, my husband and I have been searching for ways to simplify our lives. We long to be more present in a world that…

“Did they really just say that!?” I pulled over at the nearest Starbucks and turned the radio volume to full blast. “No, they couldn’t have said that!” I begged my senses to recompose and leaned in to hear more. Their two voices boomed through my shock as they repeated their diatribe. “Yeah, Mike! You heard…

I still remember vividly the time when one of my colleagues looked at me with derision when I mentioned nonchalantly that I did not have my phone with me. She had texted me just a few moments prior and had expected a quick response. I do not recall the content of the message but to…

Reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World[1] this week could not have come at a timelier spot. Thirty years ago, in March, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who at the time was working at CERN, invented the foundation for the World Wide Web after he took hypertext and connected it to…

Yesterday NPR’s national column ran an article about civility, called, “In These Divided Times, Is Civility Under Siege?“ The article names what concerns me more than perhaps anything else regarding the state of our nation, that we as a society have regressed toward a posture of incivility in our public discourse. This is quite obvious…

For Lent I took Facebook off my phone. Before I had even started Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism I knew I needed what he describes as a “digital declutter”[1] . I resonated with Newport’s identification of the good intentions we (let me own this, I) have to simply use technology to stay connected to friends overseas…

My journey on the topic of homosexuality, gay marriage, and their place in the church started many years ago when I was in full-time church ministry. Back before this population was as “out of the closet” as they are today, I would have long discussions with people in the church about how to approach this…

Choose your own……gender I wonder how many of you ever read any of the children’s books “Choose Your Own Adventure”? Essentially, they were books where the reader was able to determine some of the outcome at certain points in the story. Each decision altered the scope and conclusion of the story. Netflix has even come…

The past year has been one focused on an intentional and personal “slowing down.” I was feeling very harried after a long church transition and needed to make some changes. I started last January to intentionally make my coffee every morning using only a French Press. No Keurig, no buying it at the bagel place…

Preston Sprinkle’s editorial work on Two Views on Homosexuality explores and challenges the Christian response to modern sexual ethics surrounding same-sex couples within the church. Sprinkle referees a two-on-two literary debate over the affirming versus non-affirming views on the topic of homosexuality. Sprinkle leverages the work of Loader, Defranza, Hill, and Holmes to advance a…

Recently a screen popped up on my iphone telling me the amount of screen time I had used that week. Instantly, I went into denial mode, “No way! That has to be wrong.” Unfortunately, it was quite right and had tracked my unconscious habit of digital use. I have spent my entire adult life decluttering…

When I first met Lois, I assumed she a widow. Several of my colleagues had mentioned how she and her husband had run thriving music ministries in France for several years, but when we arrived on the field she was single. Close to retirement age, she had recently spent some time back in the States…

Confucius once said that “life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”[1] Not sure if this statement is entirely true, but it does have truth to it. In today’s world, most lives are filled with a degree of complexity that challenges our straightforward approach to it. For instance, a single mother working…

Churches were once the anchor of many communities. Today, things have changed and many churches are languishing and on the verge of dying. Often, older churches are close to dying and ignore many of the symptoms associated with their illness. Thom Rainer in his book, Autopsy of a Deceased Church: 12 Ways to Keep Yours…

This was the conclusion of a long worded statement of a newscaster on a popular television station in response to a story trending in the media of the misdeeds of a well know preacher, who has been christened “The mighty prophet of God” by his followers. The newscaster was angry at the “man of God”…

It is common sense that we do change in life from birth to adulthood. However, we hardly realize that we change as time goes by. In her book “Mindset: The new psychology of success” Carol Dweck wrote, Whether human qualities are things that can be cultivated or things that are curved in stone is an…

Reading this was cathartic to me. Life has been incredibly tumultuous for the past 18 months or so centered around deep feelings of self-doubt, insecurity, self-hatred etc. that resulted in severe marital struggles. I moved out for the better part of 6 months early last year and even when I was home, I refused to…